


Flotsam and Jetsam, a Green Sea 'verse Story

by auburn



Series: Green Sea [5]
Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, F/M, Future Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-01
Updated: 2013-01-01
Packaged: 2017-11-23 05:46:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,744
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/618762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/auburn/pseuds/auburn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She picks up the pieces, burns up the past, and finds something new washed up on the shore of her life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Flotsam and Jetsam, a Green Sea 'verse Story

Shattered pieces of Daki Sinsissen's fishing boat washed up on the shore of Little Kos Cove for a week; swollen, soaked dark and hopeless, after the hungry rocks off Hæmírfara took it and the crew on a foggy evening. Päuvi walked the pebbled beach under the endless overcast sky each day, gathering up the flotsam of the wreck and carrying it home. After a fortnight, her walks no longer garnered more than wet shining rock and seaweed. After two she stopped going daily, knowing it worried her father.  
  
She kept the bits of her husband's life in the smokehouse behind the tavern, where they dried into something as pale and brittle as bone, like her grief.  
  


***

Kauko Bay saw strangers often enough, traders and nomads and itinerant fisherfolk come north to the Cold Waters where the schools of fish turned the deep green-blue of the icy water into shifting silver. Päuvi didn't care about any of them unless they visited her tavern to spend their silver. Her days blurred one into another and nothing gave her any joy, nothing interested her, she just rose and took care of the tavern each day until she could lie down again and sleep. When the sun came out, she lifted her face to it, but didn't feel it. When she walked past the bright painted totems at each corner of every house, she registered but didn't see them. She ate but did not taste, she listened but heard nothing but noise. She couldn't be bothered to wander past the town's second best inn for the chance at a glimpse when five of newcomers arrived from Kerena on the Green Sea, along with a child, to replace the lens on the Hæmírfara lighthouse. Not even when whispers ran rampant through town that the Old Ones' tower, the one that supported the lighthouse, had opened for them.

A new light wouldn't guide Daki home from the deep, after all.

***

She loaded the dried flotsam into a garden cart and dragged it down to the beach at Little Kos Cove a year after Daki drowned. Päuvi would not say she lost him; she was never careless with her love. She wouldn't say he passed or left. He _drowned_. The sea and the rocks, hidden in the fog, killed him. Some folk cried over their dead and she did, but for her the tears only came once because she was too angry.

She laded the bonfire with those things of Daki's that she couldn't bear to keep or give away, lit it and watched the flames flare against the dark blue of dusk. The sweep of the great light from Hæmírfara, brighter and stronger than it had been before, lit the dark waves, always moving, as restless as the water itself.

Sundown chilled the air fast, even with the heat coming off the bonfire, and she clutched her wedding quilt, the one she'd pieced herself when she chose Daki, around her shoulders until the flames began to settle into coals. Then she slipped it off, soaked it with a bottle Daki's favorite liquor taken from the tavern's shelves, and tossed it on the fire too.

She held her shoulders straight and did not look back as she walked away. The tide would drown the coals.

***

The strangers -- some insisted they came from beyond the hópursjór -- were no longer strangers when Päuvi began paying attention again. When they visited Kauko Bay for supplies, the tallest one and the dark haired man would sometimes come into her tavern, both ordering gansh steaks with the eagerness of folk who hadn't been raised on fish. When they did, then sooner or later the loud one would show up and once he did, Dark Hair would shift his chair closer to Loud each time. Then the Weather Witch and her man would retrieve all three of them about the time Tall passed out and Dark Hair or Loud fell asleep one on the other's shoulder.

They never all got drunk at once. They were wary, all of them, despite an appearance of friendliness, and never spoke of where they came from except, "Somewhere else."

Dark Hair and Loud bundled layers on layers for warmth with the expertise of folk who had known cold climates, but Tall acted like he didn't feel the cold -- only Päuvi heard his teeth chatter once.

It had been a while since she laughed and he heard her chuckle at his vanity and raised an eyebrow at her.

She slapped his latest beer down before him and arched her brow right back.

She paid a little more attention after that, noticing the big, white grin he flashed sometimes, and figured out from judicious listening -- she wouldn't lower herself to asking anyone -- that his name was Onnin.

***

She saw him again after that, often in her father's leather goods store or talking with the smith, and once at the bakery buying sweets for the boy who belonged to the Weather Witch (who let out peals of laughter when she heard herself called that). He always had a sharp-toothed grin framed in his neat black beard for her, and his sun-brown skin stayed a warm shade even in winter, while his matte dreadlocks were adorned with beads and other things she itched to see closer, and it... it irritated Päuvi, because she knew Onnin wasn't everywhere. The new keepers kept to Hæmírfara, only crossing the bay on supply runs.

Daki had made her feel the same hyper-awareness.

It made her angry and she glared at Onnin every time she saw him after that.

He grinned back each time.

She ended up walking out with him just for the chance to wipe that stupid grin off his face. It didn't work, but she did find herself smiling more often.

By then she knew the others’ names too: the names Kauko Bay gave them, Jouni and Makke, Onnin, Tuula and Kanne and Torre Emmagan, and the names they guarded more closely, but that she heard them call each other, from before they came through the Circle Sea: John the Shepherd and Rodney McKay, Ronon Dex, Teyla Emmagan and Kanaan of Athos, Torren Teylagan .

She recognized the grief that ran like a river in their veins, too.

***

Päuvi refused to go out on the water for two years after the sea took Daki, but Onnin matched her stubbornness with determination. He asked her to come to Hæmírfara for the first time after the winter festival and again until she gave in, promising his beer would be watered in every tavern in Kauko Bay if he lied and she suffered sea sickness

She almost wanted to sulk when _Hrafny_ glided over the water like a sled over snow.

Why she expected the lighthouse keeper's cottage and outbuildings to still be half-falling down to ruins after Ronon and his friends -- his family -- had been there for over two years mystified her. With four men and a woman as determined as Tuula basic repairs wouldn't have taken long. More than one fishing family from the Bay had added their hands to the work too: everyone wanted Makke Maker to stay as the lighthouse keeper. Hæmírfara's light cut through the night steadily and, more over, there were the tales already becoming legend: of a radio crackling to warn a boat away from a mistaken course, of Jouni and Onnin taking out their magical boat, _Hrafny_ , through the worst seas to render aid and rescue, of Makke fixing anything, of Tuula's ability to predict the weather. A foghorn had joined the light too, a deep and bone shaking moan that could be heard on the mainland, like the groan of a mourning whale.

The rocks off Hæmírfara went hungry these nights and days.

Many called it magic, but Päuvi knew better. There was nothing magical about Onnin -- he was a man, a fine man, but no more than flesh and bone like any other. He was a good man, though.

She asked him if he didn't miss his own world once.

"It's gone," he answered. Quieter, many nights later, he told her of the woman he'd loved, who died with his world, and she began to understand why he had waited so patiently for the color to come back into her world so that Päuvi could see him and not Daki's shadow.

"And the others?" she asked, because she'd come to realize that Tuula and Kanne came from the same people, but that Jouni and Makke didn't , though they came from the same world. They were the strangest, perhaps because of the Ancestor blood, but she suspected they were both just themselves in a way many folk weren't brave enough to be. "Did the Wraith cull their worlds too?" She wanted to know how they'd all met and become such a tight-knit family.

"Their people are still out there," Onnin said.

"And Jouni and Makke's?"

Onnin growled under his breath. "They are too, but there are worse things than the Wraith." The look he gave her told her not to question any more.

***

The interior of the Ancestor Tower amazed Päuvi, with its smooth cool metals and blinking lights, intangible 'holograms' and habit of brightening everytime Jouni walked into a room, but she still didn't want to live there. It took more than shiny things to impress her and for all the Old Ones had accomplished, none of it changed the basics of life. Tuula's twins, Seppe and Welda, still needed changing like any child, laundry still had to be done, and meals needed to be cooked and consumed.

Makke had found a way to make the Tower heat the keeper's cottage and provide unlimited amounts of hot water, though.

That impressed Päuvi.

Not enough to persuade her to leave her tavern and the little house she and Daki had built to go live with Onnin there.

She thought Onnin would leave her be after that. Instead he began staying in Kauko Bay even when the rest of his family were on Hæmírfara and she realized that if she would not go with him, he would willingly stay with her.

She began to wonder if she couldn't spend part of her year on Hæmírfara in exchange.

***

The morning after she took Onnin home to her bed, she began piecing together a new quilt, one large enough to fit the bed he'd showed her in his part of the keeper's cottage.

 

 

The End

 

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to my betas, eretria and murron. Remaining and new errors I attribute to the Christmas crud.


End file.
